“Now that ya finally got yer cutie mark, maybe the spirits of our long-departed folks can FINALLY STOP HAUNTIN’ OUR APPLE FARM.”  
“Eeenope. Don’t look like it.”  
“Horseapples.”

@Background Pony #2688  
Maybe it’s different in languages other than English, but in a situation where something momentous has just happened, “If Mom and Dad were here…” is universally– universally– the kind of phrasing which is only ever used when speaking of the dead. If they were off on vacation or “traveling salesponies” or even life-sentence prisoners in a dungeon in the place they’d been banished to, the phrasing would have been “If Mom and Dad could have been here…”, or “If Mom and Dad weren’t [ doing whatever ]”.
 
As I’ve pointed out in other threads, it would be much, much shittier if the Apple Parents were still alive, because it would mean that in an extended family which places such a huge amount of importance on kinship and family bonds, not only have they not been present for any of the important moments in the lives of their children or larger family over the last several years that we’ve seen, they have never even been mentioned before. Good dead parents are better than living shithead parents, and if the Sweet Apple Family’s parents are still aliive they are unquestionably complete shitheads. Dead, they still managed to instill in their oldest children the kind of life lessons and moral center that have made them genuinely good people right through to the core, even if they didn’t have very much time together to do it; alive-but-perpetually-absent, their children grew up into functional adults and genuinely good people in spite of them, and that is frankly way more shitty and depressing a story.
 
They’re dead, Jim.

@Lurks-no-More  
“Word of God” can eat my ass. Passed away. Not with us anymore. Bucking apples in the sky. There’s plenty of ways to say “Dead” without saying it.

@Gundlach  
Word of God from showrunners says they’re dead, and the show has done everything but have AJ say “My parents are DEAAAAAAAD!” while leaning on their gravestones to suggest that yes, they are.

@mrdoctorderpy  

 
That would be pretty unlikely for this show. That being said, Big Jim did touch on this in a recent tweet.

@Background Pony #2688  
So are they deadbeat parents you don’t care about the rest of the family because we didn’t even see them in the family reunion episode

@SuppliedRelic  

 
@Background Pony #6193  

 
Until the show uses some form of the word “Dead” I say they’re alive.

@Background Pony #2688  
They’re probably dead.

Awwwwwwwwwwww…mah feels. ;-;

@Background Pony #2688  

 
We don’t know that.

Ow! What was that? Oh, yeah. My feels. ;~;

They’re not dead.

“If Mom, and Dad were here, they’d be proud of you too.”
 
They are, Applejack.

@CrimsonDusk  
RIGHT*

OH GOD! TIGHT IN THE FEELS! :’( in all seriousness, when AJ said about her parents i was in tears

Are you trying to kill me over here? I can’t take these feels! I have reached my critical mass for feels already, thank you very much.

the symbolism… brings me to tears right now :’)